Uncle Volodya says, “Human beings, who are almost unique in their ability to learn from experience, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

Somewhere over the rainbow
nonsense rules;
boycotting vodka, a gay intifada
and playing us all for fools

Once upon a time, your ranking within the western freedom-and-democracy club was a reflection of how much you loved Israel. Suddenly, in a bizarre turn of events that has getting-even-for-Edward-Snowden written all over it, the metric has shifted to how much you love homosexuals. And Russia – unsurprisingly – is the center of a circle of pointing fingers as the homophobic flavour-of-the-year, because of what western media insists on referring to as its “anti-gay law”.

Sniffing the heady aroma of empowerment, the gay community was quick to react. Gay bars from Vancouver to London to Chicago to San Francisco have vowed to remove Russian vodka brands from their shelves. Gays of the world, unite to free your oppressed Russian brothers and sisters!!

It’s hard to overstate how stupid this all is, and you could be forgiven for being a little weary of it, because you’ve seen it before: in the embarrassing and much-ridiculed “Freedom Fries” fiasco. Back then, the target was France, because its surrender-monkey government would not climb on board the Get Iraq bandwagon. Just for fun, a blast from the past, would you like to see an excerpt from the speech made before the U.N by senior French surrender-monkey Dominique de Villepin, in a desperate attempt to put the brakes on the idiot train before it jumped the tracks? Allons-y, mes amis.

“To those who believe that war would be the quickest way to disarm Iraq, I say it would establish gulfs and create wounds that are long in healing. And how many victims, how many grieving families?

We do not subscribe to what may be the other objectives of a war.

Is it a matter of regime change in Baghdad? No one underestimates the cruelty of this dictatorship and the need to do everything possible to promote human rights. That is not the objective of UNSCR 1441. And force is certainly not the best way to bring about democracy. It would encourage dangerous instability, there and elsewhere. Is it a matter of fighting terrorism? War would only increase it, and we could then be faced with a new wave of violence. Let us beware of playing into the hands of those who want a clash of civilizations, a clash of religions.

Or is it, finally, a matter of reshaping the political landscape of the Middle East? In that case, we run the risk of exacerbating tensions in a region already marked by great instability. Not to mention that in Iraq itself, the large number of communities and religions already constitutes a risk of a potential break-up. We all have the same demands: more security, more democracy. But there is another approach beside that of force, another path, other solutions.

We understand the profound sense of insecurity with which the American people have been living since the tragedy of 11 September 2001. The entire world shared the sorrow of New York and of America, struck in the heart. I say this in the name of our friendship for the American people, in the name of our common values: freedom, justice, tolerance.

But there is nothing today that indicates a link between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida. And will the world be a safer place after a military intervention in Iraq? I want to tell you what my country’s conviction is: no.”

Was he right? Damn skippy he was, right as rain on every point. But America went ahead with the “Freedom Fries” dunce’s opera anyway. There are not too many people in the Anglosphere today who remember that as other than the epic piece of stupidity it was. But the point is, when you burn your fingers on a hot stove, it is supposed to foster an instinct in you that will prevent it from happening again.

Have we learned anything? Apparently not.

Would you like to see the law that has vested so much clout in international gayness that banning vodka is going global, and has miffed cities – hard to imagine the childishness, I know – severing their “twin” relationships with Russian cities? All right, then.

The Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offences (Collection of Laws of the Russian Federation, 2002, No. 1, Article 1, No. 30 et al.) shall be amended as follows:

1) add Article 6.13.1 reading as follows:

“Article 6.13.1. Propaganda of homosexuality among minors

Propaganda of homosexuality among minors –

is punishable by an administrative fine for citizens in the amount of four thousand to five thousand rubles; for officials –forty thousand to fifty thousand rubles; for legal entities – four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand rubles”;

EXPLANATORY NOTE
to the Draft Federal Law “On Amendments to the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offences”

Propaganda of homosexuality in Russia took a wide sweep. This propaganda is delivered both through the media and through active social actions that promote homosexuality as a behavioral norm. It is especially dangerous for children and youth who are not yet capable of a critical attitude to the avalanche of information that falls upon them every day. In this regard, it is necessary to primarily protect the younger generation from the effects of homosexual propaganda, and the present bill pursues this goal.

Family, motherhood and childhood in the traditional, adopted from the ancestors understanding are the values ​​that provide a continuous change of generations and serve as a condition for the preservation and development of the multinational people of the Russian Federation, and therefore they require special protection from the state.

Legitimate interests of minors are an important social value, with the goal of the public policy toward children being to protect them from the factors that negatively affect their physical, intellectual, mental, spiritual,and moral development. Paragraph 1 of Article 14 of the Federal Law № 124-FZ of24.07.1998 “On Basic Guarantees of Child Rights in the Russian Federation” directly states the obligation of public authorities of the Russian Federation to take measures to protect children from information, propaganda and campaigning that harm their health and moral and spiritual development.

In this connection it is necessary to establish measures to ensure intellectual, moral and mental security of children, including the prohibition onto perform any act aimed at the promotion of homosexuality. By itself, the prohibition of such propaganda as an activity of purposeful and uncontrolled dissemination of the information that could harm the health and moral and spiritual development, as well as form misconceptions about the social equivalence of conventional and unconventional sexual relationships, among individuals who, due to their age, are not capable to independently and critically assess such information cannot be regarded as violating the constitutional rights of citizens.

Given the above, a bill suggesting amendments to the Code of Administrative Offences was prepared to introduce administrative responsibility for propaganda of homosexuality among minors. In this case, administrative responsibility is established not for the sheer fact of the person’s homosexuality, but only for propaganda of homosexuality among minors.

This bill imposes the right to make records of administrative offences for public actions aimed at propaganda of homosexuality among minors on the law enforcement officials (the Police), and trial of cases of administrative offences– on the judges.

Please note – this law does not, in any way, prohibit adults from being gay, or being seen to be gay. You’ll see why that’s important in a minute. It introduces administrative punishments – fines – for the promotion of homosexuality as a behavioral norm to a minor child. In Russia, that means anyone aged 16 and under. The explanatory notes are at pains to point out “administrative responsibility is established not for the sheer fact of the person’s homosexuality, but only for propaganda of homosexuality among minors.”

Since this anti-gay law has so infuriated homosexuals all over the world, only two possibilities exist – (1) they have not actually read it, and have no real idea what it says, but are content to follow mob rule because the empowerment is too exciting for them to bother considering they may be advocating from a position of ignorance, or (2) they demand the right to market homosexuality as a behavioral norm to children aged 16 and under. Because behavior other than that is defensibly not against the law.

Own it, my gay brothers and sisters – which is it?

I’d be interested to hear why gay people demand the right of access to minors. Kids 16 years old and under are still in school. Do they need to learn The Gay Way for purposes of basic sex education? Why? What does where you intend to stick your penis have to do with learning how to put on a condom correctly? Kids already learn it; after that, it’s pretty much point and push. Is it to protect them from sexually-transmitted diseases? Already part of the focus of basic sex education. To protect them against unwanted pregnancy? Ha, ha. Is it to teach them tolerance, so they will not pick on gay people when they get older? Schoolchildren already learn that it is wrong to discriminate against people because they look, act or worship differently, and there have been far fewer suicides of Russian schoolchildren over anti-gay bullying than there have been in western countries; they must be doing something right.

I doubt that persons of the same gender holding hands or exchanging low-key demonstrations of affection is going to be regarded as “homosexual propaganda”. Unless perhaps the two are schoolteachers at work in school, in which case no public demonstrations of affection – whether homosexual or heterosexual – are permitted. But say it’s on a city bus, where minors are present. Do you really think if two women on the bus are holding hands, a SWAT team is going to smash in the windows and drag them away? Come on. However, if they’re playing sloppy tonsil-hockey in front of everyone, that is offensive to a broad spectrum of society and simply being gay does not grant you absolution from responsibility to behave respectably in public. Elderly people still have a functioning sex drive, too, and are an identifiable social group. Grandpa and Grandma sitting on a bus seat together holding hands – no problem. Grandpa with his tongue down Grandma’s throat and his arm up her skirt like he’s prospecting for gold – big problem. Perhaps I’m getting the wrong impression, but it seems to me that gay-rights advocates are crusading for the right to behave with complete hedonism in public. And if there is a group that loves to act out in public more than homosexuals do, it must be the Stratford Theatre.

The law says you may not market homosexuality as a behavioral norm to minor children. Well, is it? If homosexuality is natural and normal, why can’t homosexuals reproduce naturally? If it were natural and normal, there would be only one sex, and it would blaze out in a single generation, or it would be capable of high-function asexual reproduction or we would all be born hermaphrodites, a plug-and-play species. Since none of those conditions prevail, I believe we must conclude that homosexuality is not the normal or natural state – and, furthermore, that it is a state at which humanity arrived all by itself, without input at the drawing-board by The Creator.

That notwithstanding, it must be acknowledged that the gay community has provided the world some of its finest playwrights, poets, artists, performers and philosophers – in fact, due to the late closeted nature of homosexuality, imposed upon it by revulsion and persecution in decades past, it is very likely the gay community provided the world with giants in every field of endeavor, but their sexuality was a puzzle-piece which remained undiscovered. For that, it is owed a debt of gratitude, and at the very least homosexuality must be regarded as a reality that is not going to be discorporated, frightened, wished or legislated away.

Understand me – I get that love is love, and I’m not arguing you should deny the call of your heart if that’s what you really feel, just because some of society disapproves. The same resistance was encountered by interracial relationships, and nobody thinks anything of that any more. But a law which restricts pitching homosexuality to minor children is not unreasonable. Neither is teaching basic sex education in schools pitching heterosexuality. It is focused on preventing sexually-transmitted disease – which is a concern for homosexuals as well – and preventing unwanted pregnancy, which is not. It is not disadvantaging homosexuals, and it is not anti-gay.

Which is why it is particularly disappointing to listen to the coded rhetoric of Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, as he “blasted Russia’s hateful anti-gay law“. Mr. Baird and others allegedly “raised concerns” both before and after the signing of the law, which suggests that Mr. Baird is well aware of exactly what the law says – God knows politicians should all have learned by now not to blather about issues on which they know nothing. Therefore, he knows the law applies only to the propagandizing of homosexuality to minor children, which is those 16 years old and younger. There are all sorts of red herrings, such as that gay Olympic athletes may be arrested, and that simple displays of affection such as holding hands or displaying the rainbow flag are now banned. Really? Show me. No specific examples of “homosexual propaganda” have ever been provided – activists complained the meaning was not clearly defined. Homosexuality has been legal in Russia since 1993 – 10 years before it was legal in the United States, and even that was pushed through only in the shocked aftermath of the gruesome torture murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming.

Policymakers are knowingly misrepresenting the Russian law, and gays are responding unthinkingly, because they perceive an outpouring of western support for gay rights which is, in fact, an illusion. The gay are simply being used as a battering ram to put pressure on Russia, because the west has no other way.

I mean, there’s no appetite for a gay boycott of oil, is there? Think you can get gay people to stop using any means of gasoline-powered transport, and convince them to put on a sweater instead of turning on any non-electric heat? After all, Russia is the world’s largest energy producer. But that will never happen, because three of the USA’s top five companies are oil companies. Oh, and Saudi Arabia is a close ally. Where, incidentally, the penalty for any same-sex activity is death, or life imprisonment; you pays your money and you takes your chances.

I mentioned earlier that Milan, Venice and Turin had severed their “twin” relationships with Russian cities in outrage over the “anti-gay law”. However, Milan remains twinned with Dakar, Senegal, where any same-sex activity is illegal and punishable by 1 to 5 years imprisonment. Turin remains twinned with Kazerun, Iran, where any same-sex activity is illegal and punishable by death. Venice had only two twins; since it dumped St Petersburg in a show of solidarity that likely had the gay community in tears of emotion, it now has only one – Esfahan, Iran. Yeah, that’s right. Give me sodomy, or give me death.

Stolichnaya vodka, often referred to as “Stoli” by regular vodka drinkers, is the target of choice in the gay purge of Russian vodka. It’s actually made by two different companies; the one which markets the vodka being pulled from gay bars in Canada and the United States is really made by SPI Group, a company based in Luxembourg. The CEO, Val Mendeleev, says, “the Russian government has no ownership, interest or control over the Stoli brand that is privately owned by SPI Group.”

Oh, look; New York City gay bartenders dumping Stoli on the street, in a gay symbolic protest in front of the Russian consulate. I’m sure that will hurt their feelings, since it was bottled in Latvia and made by a private Luxembourg company. That’s OK, the Latvians do not need jobs, it’s a very wealthy country. Yes, I was being sarcastic – the per-capita GDP in Latvia was just a little over $5,000.00 a year in 2012. Additionally, the gay community in Latvia begs the world not to boycott Stolichnaya – not just because it is only tenuously Russian, but because gay Latvians fear a backlash of hatred will be directed against them.

And here, in another of those weird double exposures, is a story about Young Americans For Freedom gathering at the French consulate in New York City in 2003, to pour French wine into the gutter. Freedom fries, anyone? Incidentally, the CATO Institute pointed out at the time that boycotting French wines would hurt California manufacturers, because they would have to lower their prices to get under the artificially-depressed price of French wines. But damn, a boycott sure feels good, doesn’t it? We’re doin’ something!!

Those who are fond of pretzel logic, riddle me this: how did we get to a point where the Russian Orthodox Church’s lack of support for the unrestricted freedom of homosexuality is an intolerable restraint which requires an international gay assault to overcome it….cheered on by the political class and press of the country in which the penultimate president was elected with the enthusiastic support of evangelical voters? George W. Bush carried every state in which there was a significant Southern Baptist presence. You better believe religion mattered then, oh, yes, and the newly-elected president was quick to reward those who had helped him: with the establishment of the National Day of Prayer, the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, and the re-imposition of the gag rule with regard to abortion services in American foreign aid. You remember the Southern Baptists – they’re the ones the religious press was talking about back then when they said, “When we talk to evangelicals about political issues, we actually hear them talk much more about gay marriage than about abortion. It’s not that they’re not concerned about abortion. But it’s like people have been fighting that battle for a long time. Everyone knows this script. There’s a sense that if there’s going to be movement in one direction or another, it’s going to be relatively minor…Whereas with gay marriage, there’s a feeling that they’ve just gotten hit with a tidal wave, and that society as they know it, and as they think it should be, is being destroyed rapidly. It’s urgent. It’s an emergency. And something has to be done about it.” Mmm hmm. Gay marriage is going to destroy society. That’s right there at home, folks, if you’re not too busy boycotting Russian products to punish them for not being sufficiently welcoming of homosexual rights to chat up minor children.

In case you’ve forgotten, it was the ultra-radical Westboro Baptist Church which picketed the funeral – the fucking funeral, if you can believe it – of Matthew Shepard, carrying signs that read “No Tears For Queers”, and “Fag Matt Burns In Hell”, and others which featured crude stick figures in sexual positions. The Supreme Court upheld the church’s right to free speech. Just in case the sublety of that point slipped by you, let me re-frame it – it is apparently fine for the U.S. Supreme Court to legislate against gay rights in the interests of the majority who are not gay – in any event, it has not inspired a gay boycott of black robes and oak paneling. When Russia legislates in a manner which is even perceived to champion the rights of the majority – and 16.5% of the Russian population is 14 and under, I find it hard to believe a higher percentage of Russians are homosexual – it’s simply unacceptable. The Westboro Baptist Church is a hero to websites like godhatesfags, which described Shepard as someone who “…lived a Satanic lifestyle [and] got himself killed trolling for anonymous homosexual sex in a bar at midnight.”

But I don’t want to interrupt your high-fiving each other for how you’re bringing Russia to its knees.

Western policymakers, and the mainstream press which are their mouthpiece, are encouraging militant gay activism by hyping the vodka boycott to make it seem larger and more effective by far than it actually is, at the same time they are pushing gays and gay-rights activists toward demanding a boycott of the Sochi Olympics so that it will appear to them it was their own idea. Drunk with imagined success and tingling with imagined acceptance, the gay community thus far is going along with it even better than the initiators could have hoped. There is no broad support, politically or otherwise, for an Olympic boycott, and the athletes at least want nothing to do with it. But if a powerful special-interest group could develop support based on the narrative that Russia must be punished for its barbarity, and sacrifices must be made for the greater good…

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe the manipulators seriously think they’re going to be able to achieve a total boycott. But I believe they would happily settle for gay activism turning the Sochi Olympics into one gigantic rainbow protest. And it is this that would do the most damage, because the authorities would have to react and there would doubtless be incidents which would be spun as a brutal authoritarian crackdown on human rights, with bonus negative publicity for Russia while creating a distraction which would see the protests remembered as the defining story of the 2014 Olympics rather than any feats of athletic achievement.

The gay community thus far is happy to cooperate – delirious with excitement, in fact – by boycotting vodka which is neither made in or owned by Russia. A state of near hysteria prevails over a law perceived to discriminate against homosexuals which specifies in its text that no administrative penalty may accrue to anyone simply because they are gay. The same gay community which claims to yearn for anonymity, to be treated like everyone else, is gathering itself for an assault on Russia because it will not allow gay people to have a parade… which advertises their difference.

Gay activists who were truly focused on strategy and advancement of gay rights would know enough to demand up-front compensation of the policymakers in the form of domestic reforms at home, rather than running about waving rainbows and shouting down a law they do not understand. But the string-pullers know their weakness, and they dangle in front of gays an opportunity to scream in the face of everyone who ever called them fag or dyke or pansy or queer. The sad thing is that illusory arm around the shoulders, that gay momentum, will fall away just as soon as the gay footsoldiers have served their purpose.

And for that they will throw away the patient work of years of building acceptance, as the gay community will almost certainly be blamed for the worsening of international relations that would inevitably result from a deliberate attempt to sabotage the 2014 Olympics.

note that Leno doesn’t challenge Obama, after the latter suggests that Edward Snowden could’ve comfortably enough whistle blown in the US – something contradicted by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Daniel Ellsberg, Carl Bernstein, a former ethics adviser to the US Department of Justice, among others.

As previously noted, Obama is wrong for saying that Putin doesn’t have much experience with getting challenged in an open media type situation. There’ve been numerous examples, including this one in St. Petersburg with Bush II:

The homosexual lobby started a story that he’d been ditched by the TV channel “Russia-1” for fear that his hosting in drag of a popular show would risk legal action being taken over possible allegations that he promotes homosexuality. Russia-1 has stated that his contract for the show had terminated and he’s working on the production of that channel’s New Year spectacular.

Danilko caused a scandal a few years ago at that long widely acknowledged homosexual-fest, the European Song Contest, because he sang a song that some thought took the piss out of Russia, something which he denies.

Verka Serduchka not thrown off “Russia-1” because of his promotion of homosexuality

Danilko’s contract with the TV channel had simply ended

Danilko’s contract with the TV channel had simply ended and “Russia-1” hastened to deny the story that singer Andrei Danilko, aka Verka Serduchka, had been suspended from work because of his promotion of homosexuality. It has been revealed that Danilko’s contract had ended, but that he would continue to appear in other television show.

The media had reported that Andrei Danilko appearing in drag as Verka Serduchka, had been removed from the programme “Saturday Night”, which was hosted by him and Nikolai Baskov. It had been suggested that the image of the artist in drag may have violated the prohibition homosexuality law.

“Russia-1” has denied these rumours. According to a spokesman, Danilko’s contract had expired a few months ago. “Verka Serduchka as hostess of ‘Saturday Night’ has not worked 4 months now because about four months ago our usual semi-annual contract with each of the programme co-hosts expired. Nevertheless, with his songs as part of ‘Saturday Night’,Danilko still regularly appears. Nevertheless, we are now in talks with him about his participation in our traditional ‘New Year’s Lights at Shabolovka’ [TV studios – MT] show”, the spokesman told told RIA Novosti press-service.

It should be remembered that after “Eurovision-2007” in Helsinki, Verka Serduchka did not appear for several years either on Russian TV channels or radio stations. There was a scandal then because of “Serduchka’s” lyrics: the chorus of Danilko’s song [“Dancing Lasha Tumbai” – Danilko said that “Lasha Tumbai” was Mongolian, but it isn’t: it’s just gibberish – ME], which he sang in Ukrainian, sounded to Russians as though he was singing “Russia Goodbye” instead of “Lasha Tumbal.” Against the unstable background of the neighbouring states of Russia and the Ukraine, these words were seen as giving a political colouring to the song and a total boycott of the Ukrainian artist resulted, although Danilko still denies that sang “Russia Goodbye”.

End of translation

Danilko has always denied that he is a transvestite and says that he once lived with a woman for 8 years.

He clearly did not sing “Dancing Lasha Tumbai” in Ukrainian. For some reason or other he sang it in German and English.

I wrote above:

“…the chorus of Danilko’s song [“Dancing Lasha Tumbai” – Danilko said that “Lasha Tumbai” was Mongolian, but it isn’t: it’s just gibberish – ME], which he sang in Ukrainian, sounded to Russians as though he was singing “Russia Goodbye” instead of “Lasha Tumbal.”

I should have written:

“…in the song chorus [“Dancing Lasha Tumbai” – Danilko said that “Lasha Tumbai” was Mongolian, but it isn’t: it’s just gibberish – ME], Danilko, who hails from the Ukraine, sounded to Russians as though he was singing “Russia Goodbye” instead of “Lasha Tumbai.”

Yeah, I always thought he was one of them. I think that’s why he sang “Goodbye Russia” because he really believed that his home country had shrugged off the Mongol-Tatar Moskal aggressors and was blissfully heading for EU membership and the green uplands of Europ, where everything flowed with milk and honey – but they would still get a huge discount on Russian gas, at least on the gas that they bought and didn’t thieve as it was in transit to Germany. And I think all this bloody annoyed the Russians because he wasn’t below earning his crust in Moscow.

This just in on the Navalny Break down the door story. This is the best eye-witness account I have seen so far, complete with photos and videos. It’s on the blog of Dmitry Noskov, a former white-ribbon type who nowadays is maybe not as close to Navalny as he used to be. To the point, he strongly implies that the cute girl in that hairstyle [what is that word for Rasta-dreadlocks on a white girl?] is Navalny’s lover, and that she was living in this flat along with several other Navalny supporters. This little underground cell who were producing the fliers and stickers call themselves “Navalny Brothers”.

However, Navalny has partially disowned them, because apparently whatever they were doing in printing up the agit-materials actually is illegal, for whatever reason.

They are appearing in Basmanny court today on numerous charges, and Navalnyites are waiting to see if Navalny will support them, or distance himself from his over-zealous supporters.

Yeah, these Navalny Brothers were the ones that were trying to provoke the cops on Tverskaya and outside the Duma after their Messiah had been given bail on appeal. They stuck Navalny Brother stickers all over – on shop windows and car windscreens. I think a lot of the so-called supportive horn tooting off motorists that day came from drivers who were bloody annoyed at having stickers stuck on their vehicles. And it was two Navalny Brother girls that tried to start fires that evening.One of them even tried to set a Moscow paddy wagon alight; the idiot climbed onto its roof and tried to start a fire there. What an idiot!

As I understand it according to Russian election law campaign leaflets must specify both the publisher and the print run. This apparently is done in order to ensure that the campaign remains within its spending limits. Essentially what is being alleged or rather what has been established since there is no doubt of it is that what was happening in the flat was a parallel operation going on outside Navalny’s official campaign and outside its spending limits with leaflets being printed illegally and off budget. What is not clear is that Navalny himself was personally involved or even knew what was going on. It is not impossible that the operation in the flat was being carried out without his knowledge. Incidentally the story of smoke appearing from under the door suggests an attempt to burn the evidence. That would be dangerous to say the least.

The figures are set in stone. There’s been no shift for several weeks now with Navalny continuing to poll 9%. VTsIOM predicts a 48% turnout allowing Sobyanin to win 67.5% of the vote as against Navalny’s 13% and Melnikov’s 6.5%.

I believe this poll was taken after Debate #1. Looks like every candidate went up a few points, as undecideds pick the one they like. Melnikov gained a few points. Navalny gained a few points because he came off in the debate as halfway normal, not the lunatic some viewers might have been expecting.
I am curious to see if the Levichev “Break down the door” event will have any effect on the next poll. I would expect Navalny’s numbers to go down, when voters see the poor behavior of his sect mates. However, I have been surprised in the past. I thought Navalny’s numbers would go down after his KirovLes conviction, once people saw what a crook he is. Instead they went up! Go figure…

The polling numbers haven’t changed at all despite the first debate. VTsIOM did its poll and out of every 100 respondents 9 said they would support Navalny as opposed to the more than 50 who said they would support Sobyanin. In other words Navalny’s support is still 9% where it has been for weeks. VTsIOM gives him 13% on a prediction that the turnout will be 48%. I don’t know why VTsIOM is predicting only a 48% turnout when more than half the respondents say they will vote for Sobyanin but it’s their business so they presumably have reasons. If you think about it 13% of a 48% turnout would mean that Navalny had fallen back from the 9% of the electorate he is polling now to around 6%.

On a separate point, people do not follow complex trials like the KirovLes trial in the detail that we did. The loudest narrative after Navalny was (and was bound to be) that he had been convicted for political reasons irrespective of whether or not that is true. That was bound to bump up his numbers and I discussed that possibility in my essay. The surge has not been very big. If you believe VTsIOM it was from 4% to 9% where it’s since stuck. Other polls gave Navalny a bigger surge but that seems to have fallen back slightly.

Dear Alexander: Yes, it is starting to get clearer about the election law. Apparently, campaigns are tightly regulated by very specific laws, and you are correct that the agitation leaflet or object must show the publisher and print run. In addition, I found this additional tidbit today:

According to the election codex of Moscow, all agitational products, and the work of the campaign HQ must be paid out of the campaign fund of the candidate, and the amount may not exceed 200 million rubles. If a candidate exceeds (this limit) by more than 5%, that is to say 15 million rubles, then he may be removed from the race.

END OF TRANSLATION

Having said that, it is my understanding that the August 13 shenanigans of the “Navalny Brothers” activities (printing excess campaign materials in Drovetsky’s flat) do not entail criminal penalties. The only punishment, I believe, is that Navalny would be booted out of the race. (The fact that the Navalny Brothers went to court and received criminal fines was not because of the agit materials themselves, but because they allegedly disobeyed police order to open the door.)

Nonetheless, you can be assured that if this incident had been on behalf of the Sobyanin campaign, Navalny and the entire western press would be howling “Fair play!! Kick Sobyanin out of the race!! I say, fair play!!”

Exactly. Which reminds me of another point I forgot to make in my reply to Alexander’s comment. Kindly Mercouris had surmised (generously) that maybe Navalny wasn’t aware of these extracurricular activities (all the printing of leaflets and hoarding of agit-materials, etc.) being done by his supporters.

Personally, I think that theory is dubious, because for months and years now, Navalny has been urging his followers to print leaflets, fliers, stickers, etc. and spread the word everywhere they can: in elevators, mailboxes, staple to trees, etc.

For example, here is a typical Navalny project called RosAgit , in which he urges his creative followers to make leaflets, ribbons, etc.
Also, for months, it was standard practice on Navalny’s blog for his commenters to brag about how many leaflets they had stapled up that day, and papered every elevator in their flat, etc..
Now, granted, all this proselytizing was going on before Navalny became a candidate for public office.
But Navalny’s followers had the habits, and the practice, and I would bet money that Navalny knew exactly what they were doing in that flat. Especially since that same flat is apparently the love-nest where Navalny hooks up with his girlfriend.

Election monitors be warned:
When the flat is a’rockin don’t come a’knockin!

If Navalny really was behind this parallel campaign then it shows how reckless he is becoming. Presumably he no longer cares what rules he breaks because as I believe Zhirinovsky said today he knows he is going to prison anyway.

I didn’t think the disclosure about the referral to the Interior Ministry by the Procurator General’s Office would do Navalny any harm. People tend to be cynical about election funding and probably think (rightly) that everybody is cheating the rules. However a secret campaign headquarters in a flat looks altogether too much like a revolutionary cell. Navalny needs to be careful how he handles this one.

That’s a good point. In Debate #2 there was a bit of hair-pulling catfight between Navalny and Levichev; in which Levichev rather primly distanced his party from Navalny’s “underground” methods. While Navalny and Levichev were hissing at each other, Degtarev chimed in with some sarcastic asides.

This is all part and parcel of Navalny and his hamsters’ claim that there is a “regime” that occupies the Kremlin, that the present government and its cohorts are political “occupiers” of Russia and that the “opposition” are not such as in the parliamentary sense of the word, but rather freedom fighters in battle with an alien force of evil “crooks and thieves”. The opposition, with the Chosen One at the fore, are not, therefore, undertaking a political campaign but a revolutionary war against the enemies of the Russian state, a war wherein electoral rules and procedures do not apply. It’s the same when these people are in the courts: they cry out: “We do not recognize this court, this judge, these laws!” and adopt postures and read their cell phones and in general show contempt for the “regime” that they consider illegal. And those that are not of this opinion are “cattle”.

Yet they shriek that Russia “does not have the rule of law”. Plainly what they mean is that the only law they will respect is that delivered by courts they have appointed, which write laws in accordance with their worldview and which are compliant to their will. A rose by any other name would not always smell as sweet. I often wish they could have their own tiny Republic, maybe 80,000 Navalnyites together with their disaffected college student protesters and whatever of the intelligentsia felt like throwing in their lot with the new master instead of their eternal bitching and complaining that Russia would be a lot better if people listened to the intelligentsia. They could call it The Republic Of New Russian Freedom, or Navalnyland or Rumpelstiltskin or whatever. The government could give them a grant of a truly huge amount of money to start them off, and enough land with enough resources that they ought to be able to make a go of it, with the conditions that (a) they could never rejoin Russia in any kind of alliance, but would have to remain an independent country and raise their own currency, and (b) they could not put an American military base anywhere on it. They could sell all their industries to the big multinationals, whatever they chose. It would be interesting to see the place in 10 years.

Interesting to note that Noskov, as expected, became the object of Navalnyites fury. On his blog Navalnyites have poured out their rage upon him, called him a stool pigeon and super-grass and every other name in the book, for calling the cops in on the Navalny Brother sect.

Noskov is unapologetic: He notes that if Navalny were to go and pee on Red Square, then his (Navalny’s) sect followers would gather up the sacred liquid in vials and cherish it like holy water.

Noskov’s party (“Just Russia”) used to be allied with Navalny, and both factions participated in the abortive “Coordinating Committee”. Noskov is like Timoshenko to Navalny’s Yushchenko.

History always repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. (I just made that up – isn’t that clever?) Yushchenko and Timoshenko (1) formed an alliance to do colour revolution, (2) did colour revolution and came to power. After coming to power, they (3) went at each other with ferocious Vendetta until mutual destruction was achieved.

Noskov/Navalny decided to skip Steps #1 and #2 and just go directly to Step #3.

“The vast majority of paedophiles are heterosexual, by 2/3. This is a fact, and yes this is a crime. To be homosexual is not. Russia can join the rest of the modern world, or it can continue it’s reverse slide back into the Soviet era mentality”,

which I do not doubt: not that Russia is sliding “back into the Soviet era mentality” but that 2/3 of paederasts are perverted heterosexuals. However, I added this comment:

“If 2/3 of paedophiles are men who have sex with little girls, does that mean that the remaining 1/3 of paedophiles are men who sodomize little boys, and if that is the case, I wonder how many of those sodomists are homosexual?”

The comment passed the censor after about 1 minute following its posting. Within an hour after its appearance in the comments section, it was removed.

I wonder why?

If homosexuality is “natural”, does that automatically mean that there is no homosexual perversion, namely the desire and practice of homosexual sexual activities with children?

If it is true that two thirds of paedophiles are heterosexuals and one third of paedophiles are homosexuals then it must follow that a much higher proportion of homosexuals are paedophiles than heterosexuals, which might even suggest that the claim you hear from time to time that homosexuals have a greater proclivity to be paedophiles than heterosexuals is true. I say this because though there seems to be no real consensus on what proportion of the human population is homosexual it is certainly much lower than a third.

I should nonetheless say that I am wary of these figures. When I used to work at the Royal Courts of Justice one of my most unpleasant duties was to interview in the cells people charged with sexual offences. Though I never kept a score my recollection is that the overwhelming majority of paedophiles I had to interview were men who had sexually assaulted young girls. The most striking thing about them by the way was the complete lack of remorse they felt for what they had done. Murderers as a class were much easier people to interview.

I would say that I have personal knowledge of two homosexual paedophiles. One was my great grandfather who died in the 1920s long before I was born. My grandmother (his daughter) told me he was corrupted whilst attending a boys’ public school and was never able to rid himself of his vice though he hated himself for it. I have previously told you how attending a boys’ school practically made me a homosexual contrary to what turned out to be my true inclination. I think you told me that your experience in a boys’ school was different. Anyway my great grandfather’s experience and my own makes me think that it is indeed possible to influence people under 18 to develop in a particular way though the best counter to that is a normal life with a normal association with girls when one is young. Apart from a small number of military schools (whose cadets as I happen to know are actively encouraged to socialise with girls out of school) Russia simply doesn’t have the warped unisex education system that used to be prevalent in Britain and which one still finds in quite a few places here.

The second case was a very unpleasant one when a homosexual paedophile attempted to assault me on a bus when I was a schoolboy. He was very like some of the people I later had to interview in the Royal Courts of Justice.

Incidentally on the subject of Moscow Times, I was asked to write and send an article on the Magnitsky case to Michael Bohm who is apparently its editor. He promised to get back to me on it but never did. I can’t say I’m sorry because I don’t think it was a good article. However he could at least have had the courtesy to tell me he’d turned it down.

I have long suspected that some of those who argue that most paedophiles are heterosexual, an argument that I certainly do not in the least doubt, are playing games with the terms “paederast”, “paederasty”, “paedophile” and “paedophilia”.

Firstly,a paederast is a man who sodomizes boys. I maintain that most, if not all paederasts, are homosexual or at the very least bisexual and that they are most definitely not totally heterosexual. In Russian, however,”paederast” or “pedo” is the vulgar term for a male homosexual, cognate to “a queer” or “faggot” in English. I am sure that not all, and very a likely a majority of homosexual males are not paederasts.

Secondly, paederasts engage in paederasty. For centuries It has been a tabu and hence illegal activity in most cultures that have evolved from the Western and Eastern (Byzantium) Roman Empires, whose mores were founded on Judeo-Christian ethics.

A paedophile, however, is a person who is sexually attracted to children, be they boys or girls, paedophilia being classed as a psychiatric disorder in persons 16 years of age or older, whereby there is a primary or exclusive sexual interest towards prepubescent children (generally age 11 years or younger). Male heterosexual paedophiles very often wish to have sexual (penis/vagina) intercourse with pre-pubescent girls; male homosexual paedophiles very often wish to sodomize pre-pubescent boys.

So when I frequently see such statements similar to this, which I have already quoted above, and which appeared in the Moscow Times readers’ comments:

“The vast majority of paedophiles are heterosexual, by 2/3. This is a fact, and yes this is a crime. To be homosexual is not. Russia can join the rest of the modern world, or it can continue it’s reverse slide back into the Soviet era mentality”

I ask myself if the author of such an argument really is aware of the meaning of the term “paedophile”.

I on the other hand maintain that whilst all homosexual males are certainly not paederasts, i.e. adults who sodomize boys, the majority of paederasts must necessarily be, by definition, male homosexuals or bisexuals.

The much lauded by Guardianistas Peter Tatchell, honoured spokesman for the UK LGBT movement, makes no bones about his desire to engage in sexual intercourse with children, he having pressurized for many years for the lowering of the age of sexual consent in the liberated, free Western World and having written in a 1997 letter to the Guardian of “the positive nature of some child-adult sexual relations”. In the same letter, he continued, “Several of my friends, gay and straight, male and female had sex with adults from the ages of 9 to 13. None feel they were abused.”

Very good observations. There is a degenerate strain amongst gays that cannot be coddled and dismissed as their way of life. I do not think that it is an accident that in the Russian language paederast is associated in the way it is. It just happens to be a Russian problem that gay men have the pedophile problem. My conclusion is that this negative aspect is not as prevalent in the west. And these days it is not even politically correct to make such empirical observations, lest some soft headed deficient be offended. The west can keep its BS political correctness to itself.

It is possible that in some cases male pedophiles target male children simply because boys are more readily available to them than girls. Boys are generally more active than girls and more readily venture out on their own than girls do. Boys are directed towards sports clubs and other activities in which pedophiles can insinuate themselves into positions of trust such as sports coach, counsellor, teacher or minister of religion. I once knew someone at my local Anglican church who had been preying on boys through his role as a youth worker but at the time I knew him, I did not suspect (and neither did anyone else) that he was a pedophile. Over time, he must have let his guard slip as there was an incident, someone reported him and police quickly swooped and took him away.

People are more likely to be suspicious if they see an older man and a small girl messing about together – recently a man seen on a beach playing with his granddaughter in Sydney was reported to police (the man was upset that an anonymous person had reported him) – but less so if they see the older man and a small boy together.

We once had the full management committee of our dacha territory around at our dacha one evening a couple of years ago to have a talk to my wife about a suspected dirty old man who was always hanging around with her children. She was working in the garden, I was in the kitchen. They asked if they could have a word with her and trooped into the garden. Then the dirty old man appeared – from the kitchen.

I was unsurprised to be banned from commenting at AmericaBlog, that over-the-top gay blog Alex Mercouris cited earlier. I did get a comment in asking to be shown where in the law it says the wearing of the rainbow flag, rainbow suspenders or saying you are gay is banned, because no case law on the subject exists and nobody has yet been charged under it, while the definition of “homosexual propaganda” has been left deliberately vague because as soon as it is spelt out, activists will be parsing it for loopholes that allow them to circumvent the law. Anyway, some prat who calls himself Mike From The Tundra responded quite rudely, citing somebody’s blog post which was nothing more than that indivdual’s interpretation of what the law said, while I had asked for actual legal text which stated those practices are banned.

I spent the better part of an hour typing up a response, which included links in substantiation, challenging the silly notion that homosexual behavior in animals is vindication of homosexual behavior in humans, who among the animal kingdom are almost unique in their seeking sexual intercourse purely for pleasure rather than procreation. I included two English texts of the law, one of which incorporated the explanatory notes in which it specifically states that the simple fact one is homosexual is not a matter for that law; never mind an experienced lawyer, a dairymaid on peyote could overturn such a case in a forenoon if it were brought. I argued that two normals cannot co-exist for the same state, and that if homosexuality is “normal”, it presupposes heterosexuality is abnormal. I pointed to apparently-solid research which challenges the notion homosexuality is genetic, although researchers do agree it occurs somehow “in the womb”. After all that, when I selected “post”, I got a big red banner which read “You do not have permission to post on this thread”. And that’s what makes me maddest of all; readers who happen upon the thread will assume Mike From The Tundra’s silly argument blew the doors off mine, and that I fled in humiliation, lost for a rebuttal, whilst Mike will swagger about and bask in his own brilliance.

The Moscow Times was until recently pretty good about censoring comments, and mostly left them alone. But lately I have noticed comments which, once again, have taken a long time to research and order have gone straight into moderation, and never come out. While this is going on, comments which badly defend the Russian perspective – aparently in the authors’ second language and occasionally railing and calling the opposing commenters “ladyboys” and all sorts of names – are allowed to remain, as if for the amusement of all over what brainless undereducated boobs defend the Russian side.

After a couple such incidents, I tried (a) copying the entire comment just before sending, and if it entered moderation, posting it again a couple of minutes later; sometimes it goes through, although obviously that will do little to forestall its being removed later even though it was posted, and (b) simply inviting my principle opponent – in this case, one Christian Ivanovich – to meet me here to discuss the issues further. Please feel free to do the same.

Well I think you deserve congratulations for at least trying to reason with those people and for doing it with such care and so well. As I said in my exchange with Kirill, they are not reasonable people and as we have seen if you do not follow their party line however blatantly false it is they will simply ban you and try to silence you. Needless to say when people resort to such bans it is an infallible sign not only that their arguments are false but that they know that they are false.

Have you retained the comments you were going to send? If you have I think they should be reposted and it should be pointed out that this website that condemns Russia for regressing into Soviet habits is itself the one that practises them. I’d be prepared to do it on my blog if you wish. I think they should also be posted on the Russia Debate.

Thanks, Alex; you’re very kind. No, I didn’t save anything, and that was one of the occasions I did not copy it first, either – I was lulled by the fact that the first comment went through with no problems. It’s actually quite an old discussion, and I’m surprised more than one person was still following it.

My comment was just opinion, grounded in how I see the world. I can’t really blame them, because I imagine most of the people who are attracted to a blog on gay rights are attracted because they are gay. They have a lot invested in viewing homosexuality as “natural and normal”, because they can’t help who they are, and who wants to feel like a deviate, a queer? My point of discussion was that so long as homosexuals confine their activities – which consist only of sexual relations, who’s kidding who, there is no “gay culture”, because gay culture is human culture, gays are humans like everyone else except in their sexual orientation – to other homosexuals, who cares? I live in the most liberal of the western democracies, where gay marriage across the country is years old and where tolerance is the watchword. I do not have any problem with homosexuals; I don’t feel creeped-out around them, and their orientation is no concern of mine. A military survey years ago asked if the respondent would be comfortable sharing a two-man tent in the field with a known homosexual. I said sure, why not? After the typical day in the field, sex is going to be the furthest thing from his mind (I’m assuming the question referred to a homosexual of the same gender). Also, straights fall into a pattern of assumption which tells them they would be attractive to a homosexual simply because they are the same gender. Not so. Homosexuals have a preferred type like everyone else, and your chances of fitting it are about the same as they are for the opposite sex.

However, I think the biggest attitude change I have undergone since writing this post is an opposition to the whole gay pride thing, especially the parade. I don’t find it revolting or wierd, I just think it is the most counterproductive event imaginable for people who say they just want to fit in and be like everyone else. If that’s the case, shut up about who you are; I don’t care, and I and probably most others are prepared to take you at face value and look for common ground rather than differences. But if you insist on marching through town dressed only in a pair of latex bikini briefs and a big pink feather and you are big and hairy and male, you are making it impossible for me to see you as just like me. Tolerance, yes. Acceptance, absolutely. Celebration? Why?

I think you are being very generous. I have checked this blog again and it consists of dogmatic and often plainly false assertions, which are then mutually cross referenced in such a way as to give them spurious authority. I have no time for such a thing or for the silencing of contrary voices. It’s not as if you were trolling.

I don’t know; this is the first I’ve seen it. But it looks as if the exhortations from the international gay community to “come out” are beginning to bear fruit. Bear in mind we only have one side of the story, and it may not have gone exactly as he described, but if it did or something even close to it – ie: he did not make any comments on the law itself or whether he thinks it is fair, but only acknowledged his own sexual orientation – then I would say he is looking at a tailor-made wrongful-dismissal suit. The station cannot fire him just because he is gay, and doing so was possibly the worst thing they could have done short of bursting into the studio and shooting him. If he is as smart as he sounds he will be gathering testimonials to the popularity of his show and performance ratings by his supervisors, to substantiate that he was not fired because of poor performance in general, although the timing would be difficult to explain if that were the case. If it turns out that he was fired because he admitted to being gay, the ball should be in his court whether he wishes to let bygones be bygones and go back to work at the station or accept a large punitive-damages award, and if Putin is looking for a cause for personal intervention, this is it. If he could offer to intercede for that leathery dragon Masha Gessen, he can do it for this guy, whaddya say?

I can see that being a problem, because Canada recently shut down immigration applications on behalf of parents and grandparents, claiming they had such a backlog that they needed a hiatus in order to catch up. They offered long-term visitor’s visas instead, which is not a bad solution on its face, but things like a person’s benefit entitlements date from the time they receive permanent-residence status. My in-laws were lucky and got their cards early this year, but we applied for residency for them in 2009. The delay is so long now that some have remarked sarcastically that an applicant could realistically die while waiting.

Against that background, how is it going to look if the government is grandstanding for the gay community and flaunting its “tolerance” at the expense of people who have already stood in the queue for years? Furthermore, I’m not sure they shouldn’t have gotten it up front that you would have to satisfy the regular admissibility criteria, rather than all you need to qualify is be gay. Just what we need; a large community of Russian gays who don’t speak English or French and have no job skills other than gay advocacy.

That one has made the rounds. TV presenters are typically expected to read lines forwarded to them, with an understanding that they will tell the boss/bosses beforehand of a plan to be independently dramatic.

The idea of equality is a two way street. Not sure how a given TV exec would take to a heterosexual flippantly deciding to make sudden on air announcements about their personal matters. Who knows what else might be at play in that instance, in terms of how well that fired presenter was among his peers.

Reminded somewhat of Gessen decifing to leave Russia. Over the course of time, she has developed a streak of landing high profile management type jobs. The one with RL included some questionable action on her part, as has been noted. Now reminded of a credible theory on how Litvinenko might’ve actually been poisoned.

As I note, the job of a presenter is to typically read what’s given to him. He obviously chose another route, which can be a basic ground for firing. One suspects some other issues as well (noting earlier comments regarding Gessen and Litvinenko on the subject of possibly diverting attention away from other issues, for the purpose of scoring a desired propaganda point.) Is it common for a heterosexual to announce private life matters like who they’re dating or intending to marry?

Yes, it is, particularly the statement that Urlashov’s case is “politically motivated” and “fabricated”. I don’t know how people can tell such lies without bursting into flames, because Urlashov’s case was reviewed by the bleeding-heart Presidential Human Rights Commission, and their conclusion was that the prosecution has a solid case – as well, his alleged accomplices have confessed and fingered him as the mastermind.

All you need to have your activities covered by automatic assumption that you are innocent is to be a member of an opposition party or even an advocate for one. Then no matter what you do, any actions against you are assumed to be “politically motivated”.

Outright BS. I get no mercy if I mess up my document applications to government agencies in Canada, so why should these fringe clowns get a break? If these parties were so popular, then they would have no problems registering. This is the same story as with Kasparov, he had to forge signatures to try to get on the presidential ballot. These clowns are only viable “mainstream” candidates in the propaganda narrative of the western media.

According to Lenta.ru, seems like he “came out” during a transmission then quit himself.
;

Translation

“Journalist Anton Krasovsky has quit channel Kontr TV, which he launched with Sergei Minaev. On January 26, Kontr TV CEO Sergei Komarov posted on his Twitter screenshot posts by Anton Krasovsky with the words: “In general, I cannot work on your TV channel, where I’m not important.” Komarov added that the presenter’s request was granted.

“Anton Krasovsky declined to comment on his dismissal from the channel, but sources at Kontr TV have confirmed this information to “Lente.ru” . The page on which Krasovsky’s announcement appeared has been deleted from the Kontr TV site and the journalist himself has removed the name of the channel from his details in his Twitter account.

“Krasovsky left Kontr TV after the broadcast of the programme “Angry Guyzzz” on January 25, which discussed the law banning the promotion of homosexuality. January 25 was the day when the State Duma adopted the law in the first reading. In the TV show Krasovsky said that the MPs who voted for the “Anti-Gay” law, voted against themselves. The journalist also said that if you stand in front of the State Duma with a poster “Burn in hell, fag race”, few people would think that the poster was addressed to homosexuals….”

But note that it says above that he quit, then in the next paragraph that he was dismissed. However, it also says that he requested dismissal and the request was granted.

On Al Jazeera, Krasovsky said he was fired for saying that he’s gay. Perhaps I misunderstood. I posted the link. Could be a matter of Ioffe taking that claim without second guessing it. Journalism has some ****** up situations.

… Could be a matter of Ioffe taking that claim without second guessing it. Journalism has some ****** up situations.

You have no clue what you’re talking about — Ioffe wrote about Krasovsky’s firing back in February, long before dilettantes like you even knew his name. Your envious obsession with her is beyond pathetic. Give it up Mike, she’s way out of your small-time league.

If you tell your boss you can no longer work in his organization and your boss thereupon closes your contract, have you been arbitrarily fired or dismissed at your own request? Komarov, Krasovsky’s boss, says that the “show presenter’s request was satisfied”.

Whatever the case troll, the guy comes across like he might be a drama king, queen, whatever.

Years ago, the Fox TV network aired “In Living Color”, an African-American comedy show hosted by folks, who were the opposite of the so-called Uncle Tom category.

Like the latter day comic Dave Chappelle, that show was constructively critical. (I like that spirit, as evidenced by how I can take a shot at RT, when I see something that isn’t quite right, while nevertheless supporting its overall presence.)

One In Living Color skit showed a naked black man screaming racism as he was trying to get the attention of a cabbie.

You bet I’m an improvement over Ioffe and some others on a number of issues, you little dip of a cowardly twerp.

But was he dismissed simply because he declared himself a homosexual when he was on air or because he said he could no longer work for the company? If he had been summarily dismissed after his having “come out” and without declaring to his boss that he could no longer work for the company, then “unfair dismissal”. However, he declared himself to be a homosexual and then he announced to his boss that he could no longer work for him, so the boss simply said, in effect, “All right then! And mind you close the door when you leave.”

[Krasovskiy: Probably. But I always thought that I could be happy in Russia. It seemed to me that Russia might change so that I could be really useful here: I don’t mean functionally useful, but really useful. I really always thought I might be able live long enough to see a truly free Russia.

This is similar to what Gessen did when she quit after refusing to follow her editor’s instruction to cover the Putin stork story. She told the magazine owner that she couldn’t do the story on principle and asked to be relieved of her duties. The owner obliged. Then the story was released that she was fired. And then Putin even offered her the job back, and she refused.

I really think it’s high time for Putin to address this gay law issue head on. Where is he on this?

The Sochi games are supposed to be his pet project, yet, everything risks unraveling because of this stupid law – He should grant interviews to a select few western media outlets to clear this matter up and make it clear that no one will be prosecuted for kissing ones partner, holding hands, displays of affection or any other of the hysterical nonsense coming from the western media. This story won’t go away until Putin HIMSELF addresses it head on. if these games are as important to him as we’ve been told, then he needs to nip this in the bud.

I still don’t understand why this law was so unanimously passed by the Russian Duma without more deliberation and why they couldn’t have delayed the vote until after the Sochi Games. Whether we care to admit it or not, the Russian government handed it’s detractors a propaganda coup on a silver platter.

“Whether we care to admit it or not, the Russian government handed it’s detractors a propaganda coup on a silver platter.”

Yes, I’m afraid that’s true. It’s surprising that the Russian government was so careless, because they had to be aware that mumblings about a boycott started shortly after the choice of city was announced. They intensified to a roar over the Snowden affair, and since then the Anglosphere has just been looking for an issue it can come together around. Now it appears to have found it.

I suppose Putin could make some kind of statement on it, but the last thing he should do is start spelling out behaviors which will be acceptable during the games. For one thing, it is not up to him to interpret the law; that is a judge’s responsibility, upon somebody’s being charged under that law. If Putin spells out what the authorities will tolerate, it will only provoke a storm of anger from gay activists listing various other demostrations of affection they must be allowed or their rights are being trampled and their sexuality mocked. Gay activists present at the games will be constantly pushing the envelope, probing for weakness and trying to provoke confrontation. That way lies calamity. It will also demonstrate that the government can be moved off a particular issue by international pressure, which will intensify and redouble.

The issue could still go either way – is it building, or are those hyping it just putting their shoulders to the wheel and trying to overcome inertia? Remember, the western press will always credit the campaign with much more success than it is actually having. I think Putin should just stay away from it, what’s done is done, but the entire government should have been aware that anything the slightest bit controversial had the potential to blow up in their faces, and should have known the west loves to strut and act superior to Russia on moral issues. This was just asking for it.

The handling of this affair has been nothing short of disastrous and one does indeed wonder why no one in the parliament understood what the consequences of this law would be. Having said, I am afraid I think it is too late for Putin to intervene. It would be taken as a sign of weakness and panic and would simply fuel more demands possibly on other unconnected issues. The boycott demands are subsiding and in my opinion the best policy now is to leave alone.

As it happens Putin consistently avoids talking about homosexual issues. My guess is that he is far too intelligent and educated to share the more homophobic views of some of the supporters of this law but that he has made a political judgement that it is simply not in his interests to take these people on. A pity.

I guess what I find especially puzzling is that there are members of Parliament who are ex-athletes and ex-Bolshoi dancers – people who were likely surrounded by gays regularly during their professional careers. It’s just hard for me to imagine that they would vote for this bill when there are already laws in Russia to protect minors from sexual predators.

Yes, indeed a pity. I am hoping that whoever replaces Putin (eventually) will be more socially progressive and capable of dealing with these issues head on.

And speaking of gay porn (which nobody was)..
I always thought that Japanese porn was mostly octopus-based.
However, this Japanese artist seems to have a weird thing for Ivan IV and his catamite Fedor Basmanov. ??

The PR disaster issue point was made further up this thread, as was the matter of the contrast with overall Russian public opinion. You’re making an argument for an establishment liberal presence at the high level of Russian governance.

The argument has been made that it takes a strong man to essentially acknowledge something wasn’t right and seek a change. It’s the broadness of the law that’s being harped on. it’s one one thing to specify no pornography or teaching of homosexuality in public school. The matter of Gay pride parades can be determined at the municipal level.

Once again, it’s not like the West is so advanced. The number of past and present NBA, NHL, MLB and NFL players (none to my quick offhand knowledge) who acknowledged being homosexual while actively playing in these leagues serves as an underscoring point.

My understanding is that the lower house of the Duma passed the bill 436 – 0 with one abstention so its passage through the upper house and the President signing it into law must have been a formality. I doubt that Putin has so much authority or power that he could delay signing the bill into law. It’s a huge mistake to ascribe the same powers to Putin that the US President has or is often assumed by Western media to have.

We’d have to know who introduced the bill originally, what reasons were given for its introduction and how it was discussed to understand better why it was passed unanimously through the Duma.

Jen said: “We’d have to know who introduced the bill originally, what reasons were given for its introduction and how it was discussed to understand better why it was passed unanimously through the Duma.”

…And naturally, it would be asking too much of the western media to actually do a little research when penning these hysterical articles to actually answer these questions for their readers. I think they’re incapable of positing these questions because much of their propaganda rests on Putin having absolute dictatorial power, so anything which throws that into question is ignored.

It’s far easier for them to take the intellectually lazy way out and compare Putin to Hitler and Stalin rather than getting off their bums and actually finding out how and why the law came about…You know, actually practice journalism.

Western press doing RESEARCH?? Doing actual JOURNALISM??
Ha ha! you make me laugh, my friend…
You see… that takes HOURS of work. Maybe even days.
Who has time for that?

Whereas, it only takes 5 seconds to type:
“Dictator Putin sees his regime crumbling around him, so just like Stalin and Hitler he had to start picking on gays in order to consolidate his slipping power, and also stick his thumb in the eye of Western democracies.”

In truth, as Jen pointed out, Putin had no choice at that point except to sign the bill. I guess technically he could have vetoed it, but he has to balance a lot of spinning plates, and so has to pick his fights very carefully.

Having said that, I didn’t do the research either, and I don’t know who introduced the bill. During one of her TV interviews, Julia Ioffe managed to slip in edgewise (over the sound of idiots moving their jaws) that the bill originated out in the provinces. Part of some larger, maybe rural, anti-gay backlash. Probably connected with the neo-nationalist, pro-religion revival too.

I don’t know who sponsored the bill in the Duma but as I understand it the ball started to roll when the regional parliament in St. Petersburg passed a similar law in I believe March 2012. The sponsor of that law appears to have been an individual called Valery Milonov. I believe he was previously a liberal who was associated with Galina Starovoitova but as sometimes happens after her death he became disillusioned with liberalism, discovered Orthodox Christianity and is now a local MP for United Russia. I have heard that he keeps a picture of the Patriarch over his desk. The St. Petersburg started a trend and several other Russian regions including I believe Kaliningrad have passed similar laws. One reason for the decision by the Duma to pass the new law is that there may have been a desire to bring the whole process under central control. The wording of the federal war is somewhat more ambiguous than that of the law in St. Petersburg.

I would add two comments:

1. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the St. Petersburg law came into effect so shortly after Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer”. Milonov is said to be close to the Church hierarchy and I don’t think it is impossible – in fact I think it is very likely – that the initiative for the law came from members of the Church hierarchy who were reacting to the “punk prayer”. The “punk prayer” and its aftermath is in my opinion the cause of the heavy atmosphere in which laws of this kind become possible.

2. Obviously the law did not originate in the rural regions. However speaking personally, I have always found St. Petersburg’s reputation as a liberal city something of a myth. It may be politically liberal in the sense that the KPRF seems to be weak there but on the occasions I have been there I have found the mood altogether edgier and more conservative than in Moscow. I believe this is also the impression of many other western travellers.

Viz Bolshoi dancers, as it happens the leading serving ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, Svetlana Zakharova, is a member of the Russian Parliament. I have said previously on a number of occasions that I am actually acquainted with someone who works in the Bolshoi administration (not as an artist).

One must not make the mistake of drawing parallels with western ballet companies. I would characterise the atmosphere within the Bolshoi Ballet company as one of aggressive heterosexuality. That does not of course mean that there are not members of the ballet company who are homosexual. The last but one director of the company was forced to resign after film appeared of him engaged in homosexual acts. However any Bolshoi dancer who is lesbian or gay would not want to publicise the fact and I am afraid that would make them even less likely to speak out against a law of this sort.

The Duma has the authority to pass such laws. The west and its perpetual imperialism couched in crusader hysterics are not something that the Duma should bend over to accommodate. Let the west huff and puff with hate. It costs the west the precious little support it has in Russia. Maybe the west does not give a f*ck, but it should for its own sake.

There is nothing wrong with this law. Sex is a private matter and some form of sex life is not appropriate advertisement to minors. The test of the “abusiveness” potential of this law is if some gay couple gets arrested for kissing in public. Everything else is fair game. And I should highlight the clearly missed fact that Russian gays of a certain liberast persuasion did and do engage in political activity that does not occur in the west. Such malicious activity needs to be cracked down upon.

Actually, he’s spoken about them ad nauseam because he was accosted constantly with relevant questions from the press during his last European sojourn. And he says the same, reasonable, thing every time, which is that different cultures relate to the issue of homosexuality differently. And that allowances should be made for these differences. The last time I saw him address the issue, he basically said he was tired of talking about it but he would repeat what he’d said many times: Both sides need to express a bit more tolerance and understanding.

Actually, I think he said he’d sign a law prohibiting Russian children from being adopted by families from countries that allow same-sex marriage. Anyway, I loved his facial expressions before answering the question.

As is often the case with Russia and the west, this whole “issue” is entirely agenda driven. I don’t think I’ve read any of Putin’s comments on the matter printed in the western press which incorrectly left me with the impression that nothings been said by him on the issue….I should’ve known better.

Yes, I do, too, but I don’t think that option is available in WordPress. If it is, I don’t know how to do it. but it’s becoming more common in other formats. i can always fix it for you and delete the comment which brings it to my attention, and sometimes I just fix them on my own if I notice.

Moscow Mayor race:
Debate #2 took place on the evening of Wed. August 14.
Atmosphere was strained, given that Navalny is really mad at Levichev. What with Levichev siccing the cops on Navalny’s supporters and all the rest of that unpleasantness the day before. But now they are supposed to shake hands and act like nothing happened…

AWKWARD!

And now let’s go to the video. Before debate itself, you have to sit through a couple of minutes of an anti-Navalny news package.

Then debate itself starts at 2:45 minutes in.
Navalny is not wearing a tie this time. In his rage and anguish over Levichev’s perfidy, he ate his own tie.

A short EXCELLENT interview with US Olympic chief Scott Blackmun. He clearly states that US athletes MUST comply with the law whether they disagree with it or not. End of story. I get the impression from his tone that he considers all of the hoopla over the anti-gay bill an annoyance and a distraction. Athletes should be focused on winning not making political statements or stirring up trouble.

What’s your interpretation of Russia’s anti-gay law and are there any measures you’re planning on taking ahead of the Sochi 2014 Olympics?

“We’ve read the law, there are over 200 national Olympic committees, and it’s not workable for each of them to develop its own interpretation and approach with respect to the law, so were looking to the IOC for some leadership in this issue. they have been in discussions with the Russian authorities, so we’re awaiting for some clarification from them.”

“Our job, first and foremost, is to make sure that our athletes are prepared to compete and aren’t distracted while they’re here. We’re a sports organization, and we’ll leave the diplomacy on the legal issues to the diplomats, and we’re not going to get involved.”

You might have to get involved if an athlete decides to make a protest.

“You can’t judge in advance what you’re going to do. Each Game is different. The athletes are always going into countries with laws different than his or her own country. They’re going to agree with those laws in some ways, they’re going to disagree with those laws in other ways. It’s our strong desire that our athletes comply with the laws of every nation that we visit. This law is no different.”

I completely agree, except for the “anti-gay law”, which is an unfair label because the law can hardly be called “anti-gay” if it does not restrict you from being gay with other gays. That’s just western branding in action. Seems to be quite successful too, as I have not seen anyone recently refer to it as “the homosexual propaganda law”; it’s just “the anti-gay law”, all the time. So I guess the world has once more sat in judgment and decided if you don’t give the gays a chance to pitch their product to the kiddies, you’re denying some little boy somewhere the chance to reach his true homosexual potential, and being unfair to gays at the same time.

“The law is that anyone under suspicion of homosexuality can be arrested,” Cohen explained to Rancic, adding he “didn’t feel right as a gay man stepping foot into Russia.”

Last month, Russia implemented a law that bans “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations around minors.” Law, signed by Russian prez Vladimir Putin, also bars the public discussion of gay rights and relationships anywhere children may hear it.

If Cohen refuses to host the pageant, then they need to find a substitute quickly. It has to be a gay man, though, that’s in the job description. (To prevent the host from sexually harrassing the contestants.)

What is sexual harassment? Oh, wait – that’s something with absolutely no guidelines, just a behavior or conversation that makes the person claiming harassment “feel uncomfortable”. It is apparently serious enough that almost every field of employment has a designated representative to educate and field complaints. But apparently that is OK.

I recommend Steven Seagal. He’s so tough-guy all the time that it just has to be a front for secret gayness. Oh, and his name ends in “gal”.

There is a strain of misogyny in certain gay male literature. Oscar Wilde and Christopher Isherwood come to mind. I once read one of Isherwood’s (I think it was a short story), and I don’t have that book any more, and I can’t find the quote online..
but anyhow, I remember that there was this detailed passage about this ship worker who had to clean the restrooms for a living, and he made this big point telling Christopher how the women were basically pigs and how their bathrooms were a living hell to clean. What with all the crap and the menstrual blood and all the rags and so on.

The effect on me was quite unpleasant, and I wish I had not read it, because this passage obviously stuck in my mind. But I think the larger point is that gay men of that generation (and maybe Harvey Fierstein’s too) felt they had to debunk women in order to justify why they weren’t interested in them. And promote their own team, of course, as being cleaner and more wholesome. Also, the gay men of that era felt (I guess rightfully) that women and romantic love were being crammed down their throats, and they wanted no part of that scene.

They’re really hyping this “anywhere children may hear it” line as proof that Russia is driving homosexuality back into the closet. In reality the law – although the specifics of what constitutes “homosexual propaganda” is deliberately vague – is quite clear that you as an offender must be deliberately targeting your advertising of homosexuality as a behavioral norm, as something “normal and natural”, if you will, which is a phrase I see often in the Moscow Times of late as well as on gay blogs, at minor children. It is not casual behavior in the street. But if he feels all creepy-crawly in Russia because it is not willing to hold a gay pride parade to announce his arrival, he is welcome to stay away.

Sobchak has hit the news after a long absence. She just had to get onto the “anti-gay law” bandwagon, I suppose. Anyway, Sobchak commented on Twitter that the recently passed law banning the promotion of non-traditional sexual relations would include a ban on the promotion of oral sex. Duma deputy Mizulina, who is the key framer of the “anti-Gay law”, filed a complaint against the “TV host and celebrity” Sobchak for libel.

Sobchak was called in for questioning by the Investigatory Committee and began to play the smart arse with them, in that she answered the key question posed to her by the IC with a question of her own.

She crowed about this thus:

“Basically, the main question of the interrogation was: ‘Why do you think Mazulina is against oral sex?’

I ask: ‘So she’s for it?’

Investigator: ‘I don’t know””

FFS! FIRE THAT IDIOT INTERROGATOR!!!!

Any decent interrogator would have jumped at her for giving such a response. Ay decent interrogator would have said: “I ask the fucking questions here, smart arse! Now tell me! What grounds have you for assuming Mizurina is against oral sex?”

But the idiot just curled up and answered her question that she threw back at him with a pathetic, wimpish “I don’t know”.

Every liberast scumbag that opens its trap to defame Russian individuals should be screwed over royally with libel action. People need to learn that there are consequences to their actions (in this case hate speech). Coddling these worms is absurd. If they are not happy they can bugger off to their promised land in the west. Naturally they will no longer make any targeted hate speech there.

If he doesn’t make the US winter Olympic team, don’t be surprised to see him as an NBC figure skating analyst at Sochi.

Elsewhere, O’Donnell had on Greg Louganis last night. That segment had some added inaccuracies and hypocrisies. Time for something more formal to be released. Contrary to troll Peter, someone like Ioffe isn’t the best counter-option.

“Jesus said to his disciples, “Things that cause people to trip and fall into sin must happen, but how terrible it is for the person through whom they happen. It would be better for them to be thrown into a lake with a large stone hung around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to trip and fall into sin.” Luke 17:1-2

It is increasingly clear to me that what Jesus meant in this passage was in effect a ban against homosexual propaganda to minors….

Anyhow, I am not convinced that Jesus was talking about children. The original Greek uses the words ἢ ἵνα σκανδαλίσῃ ἕνα τῶν μικρῶν τούτων in other words, “these small ones” – the adjective is “mikros”. I suppose he could be talking about little kids. But usually when Jesus is talking about children, he uses the word ὡς παιδίον “paedion” (Luke 18:17). I think when he used the word “mikros” he was referring to “the little man”, in other words, the common man. Or maybe he was talking about munchkins, I dunno…

It’s the effort to corrupt children for whatever reason that should be a crime. Peddling gay sex to minors is such a case. Peddling hetero sex to them is in the same category. Minors can wait until their brains have developed enough to make their own informed decisions.

I didn’t get that impression at all, although it was probably a mistake for her to respond in English, which she does not speak fluently. What I got from it was, we consider ourselves to be normal people, this hasn’t been a problem in the past and we don’t want trouble. Contrast how her remarks are portrayed with the obvious sympathy for the Swedes who painted their fingernails in rainbow colours. Oddly enough, this is interpreted as a show of support for gay rights – why was it not billed equivalently, as “Swedish athletes endorse homosexuality”?

The Anglosphere is settling into its groove, and this is now definitely being framed as a battle between Russia and homosexuality, as every English-speaking outlet continues to refer to the law as “Russia’s anti-gay law”. Shaping the narrative, just like that “party of crooks and thieves” that they insisted was so popular in Russia that you couldn’t go out to buy cigarettes without hearing it a dozen times. Reality is what they say it is.

Russia had better watch its back, because every single word said by a Russian in public is now being weighed and sampled for how it could be used to portay Russia as a homophobic nightmare, and no matter what the talking heads say, the pressure for a boycott is not slackening and it is beginning to look like a real possibility. As I have mentioned before, the Olympics have become so politicized now and are such a security nightmare for the country in which they are held that if it were my decision I would just suspend them altogether. Every single international event has been subordinated to the cause of foreign policy and politics.

Gessen was just on CNN America. The drama and innocence makes for classic propaganda.

The aforementioned CNN bit highlights a concerned parent expecting the worst for her children in Russia, thereby leading to her leaving that country.

Some years back, I was acquainted with someone in media, who said he worked under her. This person wasn’t enamored with her. I didn’t press him and have lost contact with him. He suggested that she was a poor overseer of staff, who didn’t offer much in terms of guidance. That feedback seems to relate to some of the other comments said about her.

I find it utterly amazing how the media can take a person’s words and twist and distort them in order to serve an agenda. The most classic case being Ahmadinejad’s now infamous comment about the Israeli regime occupying Palestine disappearing from the pages of time morphing into “wiped off the map.” The latter is still widely believed today even though he never said this. Also Putin’s comments about the Geo-political demise of the Soviet union have also been twisted, distorted and stripped of their context.

It’s absolutely puzzling how they can get away with these distortions without anyone calling them out.

Russians should give a f*ck. The west can go and eat shit. It says nothing about life in all of its protectorates like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It’s the truth that Russia is the “unwest” in the words of the driveling idiot Nina Khruscheva. Russia has no obligation to become part of the west and adopt is phoney “values”.

A few posts back, I linked an episode of the Arsenio Hall Show from 1993 where Arsenio was interrupted by the militant gay rights organization “Queer Nation.” When one of the hecklers asked Arsenio why he didn’t have more gays guests on the show, Arsenio fired back that he has plenty of gay guests on the show who don’t care to talk about their sexuality becasue it’s none of anyone’s damn business. Another heckler then asked Arsenio why didn’t he have HARVEY FIERSTEIN on and Arsenio told them that “when Harvey has something I’m interested in, then I’ll have him on the show.” Times have changed. Now it’s perfectly acceptable in America to go out and promote your sexuality as if it’s a gift and those of us who don’t care to hear it are “intolerant homophobes.” Probably one of the side-effects of the airwaves being saturated with reality television programs in which everyone flaunts their business for all the world to see.
Harvey’s thing has always been his in your face “gayness,” so while it wasn’t enough to exclusively allow you on the Arsenio Hall show in 1993 (though I think Harvey did eventually come on to promote a movie), it’s certainly enough in the USA circa 2013.

Yes, you’re right; I watched the clip (Arsenio started off pretty cool, but he rapidly got bent out of shape), but I didn’t pick up on the name. I had no clue who Harvey Fierstein was until Mrs. Doubtfire, and I thought he was excellent in that, but the part called for an over-the-top campy gay man, and I did not realize he wasn’t acting because I never saw him in anything else.

You’re also right that now it seems almost a requirement, if you’re gay, to act gay, like anything else is a betrayal and an admission that you’re still not out. Maybe that’s because if you don’t flaunt gayness, you’ll be taken for a heterosexual by default, and they want to make it clear who is a footsoldier in the Rainbow Army and who is not. Personally, I think that is a tactical error, because it will only point up how small the proportion is compared to heterosexuals.

Note, please, that it seems perfectly okay for a fat old gay guy to threaten physical violence against a woman on TV, probably the rainbow troops will quiver at this display of masculine je ne sais quoi. But if you did it, you’d be penning your letter of apology right now while feminists carrying torches and pitchforks surrounded your house and frightened your neighbours.

Yeah! Larry O’Donnell aggressively mansplained stuff to Julia, but even he didn’t threaten to strike her in the face. Harvey is a violent animal. Judge: Restraining order, please!
(If they got into a tussle, he could really harm her if he tripped and fell down on top of her.)

I imagine he would scratch her eyes out. Maybe not, though; she looks pretty fit, and she would have that centuries-of-patronizing-male-domination mojo working for her. Maybe she would scratch his eyes out.

I can imagine O’Donnell crossing that line, though; he gets quite carried away sometimes. “Now, hold on…hold on, Julia, are you saying…are you saying that just because you lived in Russia…that’s it, you ignorant cow, here I come for your ass. I will beat you like a rented mule, I will smack you like a red-headed stepchild…”

Actually, one of her post headlines from back when she was running “The Moscow Diaries” was, “You Wanna Dance, Old Man?” The subject of the post was Yuriy Luzhkov, she really had a hate on for him for awhile, until he was kicked to the curb, dissed and dismissed. Once he was just taillights, she lost interest. It’s the thrill of the chase that matters to Julia. Once you’re caught…meh.

Scandalous. I don’t know where they came up with that “you can be arrested just for wearing a rainbow pin” business, but it is alarmist bullshit. As it happens, I couldn’t help mocking Julia’s “I lived in Russia” defense as well, but Harvey Fierstein made me want to choke him. All that blabber about fighting prejudice wherever it is, from right here in America. Is that so, Harvey? Let’s see your “Boycott Oil to Make the Saudis Allow Bum Sex” campaign.

Sadly, this program does not stand out for mendacity in the western – mostly but not exclusively American – press, where the latest law is invariably “Russia’s anti-gay law” and the age of consent in Russia is 18 rather than the 16 it actually is, and where they squabble with one another over who can introduce the most ridiculous threshold for getting arrested because you’re gay.

On the decidedly bright side, however it pans out, Russia is not going to liberalize homosexuality permissiveness because of international pressure – in fact, if an actual boycott does ensue, and I go back and forth on it; some days it looks likely, others not, but if it did happen gays in Russia would be driven so far back in the closet they would come out in China – while the west will be filled with militant homosexual activists convinced that the government supports their drive for expanded rights.

Another example of a propped hack with a limited intellect, better suited for something else.

Pro-wrestling is classiied as sports entertainment intead of a sport. No surprise to see Ioffe involved in what can be better classified as news entertainment over something of a higher intellectual calibre.

On Navalny Brotherhood “Break down the doors” story:
More details coming in. The unfortunate landlady of the flat at #10/1/29 Chistoprudny Boulevard has told her story to Izvestia. Her name is Zinaida Shkolnikova, age 79, pensioner. She lines permanently in her country dacha now and is trying to sell her flat. While she was seeking a buyer, she was willing to rent it out on a month-by-month basis. On August 1 she was approached by a 23-year-old Siberian lad named Vasily Drovetsky.
Zinaida took an instant dislike to the young man. Her intuition told her that he was up to no good. “He represented himself as a (art) designer, said he was from Moscow, said they were repairing his house and he just needed a place to stay for a month. He promised me he wouldn’t have friends in the flat, it would just be himself and his girlfriend. He deceived me.”

One day Zinaida dropped by to show the flat to a prospective buyer, and she found that her property had been turned into a squalid nest of unsavory hamsters. (The Navalny Brotherhood sect.) These oafs were trooping around on her clean floors wearing their outside shoes.
Now her floors are all messed up, PLUS the police destroyed her steel door, when they broke into the flat to arrest the hamsters. The police promised her they would buy her a new door, but she doesn’t believe them.

Zinaida reiteratse that she DID give police permission to enter the flat. (There is heavy debate on internet whether or not cops had legal right to enter the flat. Some say no, because only the renter can give permission; others say there are exceptions when the landlord can override the wishes of the renter and enter the flat, for example, if they suspect something illegal if going on.)

In related news, one of the detained “brothers” is Oleg Kozlovsky, described as “a functionary of Navalny’s official HQ, a blogger, and a specialist in colour revolutions, who studied at Stanford University, in the program “Draper Hills Summer Fellowship on Democracy and Development” (= colour revolutions).
Kozlovsky previously tried to do a colour revolution in Minsk. I guess it didn’t work out, since Lukashenko is still in power there.

Navalny is genuinely upset and angry about his pet hamsters being rousted out of that flat. He used up some of his allocated time in Wednesday’s debate to excoriate Levichev, when he was supposed to be talking about reforms of the subway system.
At the same time, Navalny has kind of disowned his “brothers” and thrown them under the bus. He claims that he had no knowledge of them, or whatever they were doing in that flat. Navalny’s handlers also took immediate steps to rewrite history and purge all mention of Kozlovsky from the official website of Navalny’s HQ. So, Kozlovsky now is an un-person. At some point these revolutionaries will decide that Navalny is “selling out to the system”, and they will go in search of a new messiah.

An inspiration has just struck me – Navalny must announce that he is gay!!! Think of it!! Think of the supporters he would pull in overnight!! I just want to be mayor of Moscow, but they won’t let me, and it’s all because I’m queer!! Of course, he will now have to go about with a statuesque boyfriend instead of his statuesque wife – maybe Boris Nemtsov will agree to take one for the team and advance the liberal agenda by pretending to be gay as well; if he gets to go everywhere bare-chested, I think he’ll go for it. Navalny can drive to events in a rainbow Smart Car, and a carpet shaped like a giant rainbow penis could be unfurled for him to walk from the car to the podium.

The west has kind of gone tepid on Navalny, this new gay thing is really heating up, and this could be a way to wrench attention back on himself. Given how stricken with self-adoration Navalny is, I’m surprised he did not think of it.

I get a lot of searches for “Alexey Navalny Gay”, but I have never heard any such rumors. I think it’s just people trying to steal my idea. Although of course if they thought of it before me, it was their idea. But never mind that.

And okay,when I saw Degtarev at the mayoral debates, looking handsome and sleek in his nice suit, I admit I thought he was kind of cute, or at least about as cute as any male human can get. But then when I saw his soft flabby body in the bath towel – gross! ewww! Put your clothes on, dude! You look like you’re 8 months pregnant! (Same for Zhirinovsky, except he is carrying quintuplets.)

I could only stomach going as far as when he was whipping the nubile boy with branches; I hope it did not get more graphic and Folsomskyy Prospekt after that. But you can see Zhirinovsky at least knows his way around the banya – he has his own felt cap, to keep his ears from burning. That used to be one of those man-competition things with my Father-in-law; he built a banya in the backyard of the dacha, a really nice one, he’s quite crafty with tools. Anyway, he would crank the heat to see who could last longer, and I always had to leave embarrassingly early, reassuring him that non-Russians were weak and puny. Sveta says when she was younger, he would come out of the banya red as a lobster and quite a bit like Gumby without the wires, and all he could do for the rest of the day was lay sprawled in his chair like all his joints had turned to chicken fat. He said when he was a boy they used to compete with one another to see who could endure the greatest heat longest, and he would wear a rubber bathing cap to keep the tips of his ears from blistering.

Say, look who picked up a Democracy Award from NED last month – Vera Kichanova. This is Vera, a white-ribbon dissident who has dedicated her life to the overthrow of the Putin regime, because she “dreams of a country in which drunk police officers no longer attack citizens.”

I found it on a new startup called “Russian Truth“, which looks promising.

Well wow and golly gosh! She was advised by her libertarian boyfriend “to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged” and she “got interested and read some books by the Austrian School”. She then “knew there was a group of people who called themselves the Libertarian Party of Russia….They were academic people who met each other in Liberty School, organized by Cato in Georgia, and I joined them”.

Is Vera a new “Chosen One” I wonder?

Here’s Vera (right) at the Griboedov monument at Chistye Prudy protesting against conscription.

Another member of the controversial group Pussy Riot was a student at Moscow State University Faculty of Journalism is the recently elected as a municipal deputy for the Moscow District of Southern Tushino, Vera Kichanova. This has been blogged… Yes, one of the bloggers has found that the closeness of their gatherings is too tight to hide from friendly eyes.

Another member of the controversial group Pussy Riot was a student at Moscow State University Faculty of Journalism is the recently elected as a municipal deputy for the Moscow District of Southern Tushino, Vera Kichanova.
Describing the joint participation in debates at the “Kangaroo Club”, Tolokonnikova calls her girlfriend as “lesbo-libertarian”, both she and her participating in a militant feminist faction of the artistic group “War”. By the way, Mark Feigin, Tolokonnikova’s current a lawyer, took part in these debates.

It is not known whether Kichanova took part in a scandalous provocation at Christ the Saviour Cathedral. However, it has been reliably established that she is involved in the management and planning of Pussy Riot and has participated in earlier actions of the group.

And here’s Vera in a mask at on one of the first Pussy Riot actions. The photo is in her Vkontakte, where she took photographs of hereself (screenshots).

But in the early Pussy Riot actions they didn’t wear masks:

And here’s an example photo of one of the early actions of the art group “War” militant feminist faction in defence of fellow anti-fascists. In the photo: Tolokno Kichanova and a number of “people” are chained together by handcuffs shouting: “Russia Without Pputin,” “Freedom for the Anti-Fascist Gaskarov,” “Freedom for the Anti-Fascists Solopov “, “We need another Russia”, “Down With the Power of the KGB”, OMON OUT!”,” This Is Our City!”, “LOL”, ” Save the Khimki Forest”,”Con-STI-tutsiya “(not in anarchy),” Freedom of Assembly Is Aways and Everywhere! ” “Stop Cutting Down the Forest!”.

The video shows that directing the girls is Tolokonnikova’s husband, Peter Verzilov:

And here’s Vera Kichanova with her girlfriend and active member of Pussy Riot, Catherine “Kate” Samutsevich, the third one that was arrested for the Christ the Saviour Cathedral Provocation.

Kichanova and Tolokna marching in a “Queers”-column.

And this photo from Tolokonnikova’s Facebook showing Kate and Tolokno making Molotov cocktails

UPDATE

http://drug-goy.livejournal.com/841582.html – here the user writes about Katz. The questions/answers to and from Kichanova come from the Question/Answer forum “Formspring”. It goes without saying that they are a great pair:

No, you’re right; that’s not him. It was a passing similarity with the hair and that broad forehead that threw me. Besides, the one with a beard looks too much like a guy. He really is an androgynous-looking thing, isn’t he?

There must be some kind of a hyperbole school for journalists, and Chris Hayes must be a summa cum laude graduate. Little less so Julia Ioffe, who believes Russia is “where the USA was [on gay rights] 20, 30, 50 years ago.”

Is that so, Julia? In the Russia video (which Chris Hayes finds so disturbing he almost has to take off his glasses and polish them furiously), a gay man gets his face slapped a few times by both a man and a woman and has a bucket of water thrown over him, before being sent on his way, doubtless frightened and humiliated. At least we assume he is a gay man – we have no background or context, it’s just some guy getting smacked around.

Is that what America was like 20,30, 50 years ago? Let’s see. We’ll take the middle value – 40 years. Forty years ago in New Orleans, a “troubled” individual named Roger Nunez started a fire in the stairwell of a gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge. Twenty-nine people burned to death, one of them a man who threw himself on fire from a window and died in the street, another the Reverend William Larson who stood clutching the bars of a window he could not get out of and slowly burned to death, where his charred body remained visible for several hours. In all 32 people died as a result of the fire; 29 in it and another 3 of their burns.

Just some nut, right? But the real story was the American public reaction. One newspaper quoted a cab driver who said, “I hope the fire burned their dresses off”. Radio talk-show hosts joked, “What will they bury the ashes of queers in? Fruit jars”. Good to know the victims of America’s worst – and most under-reported – gay massacre served a final purpose in entertaining their fellow citizens. See much of a comparison between that and the incident depicted in the video, Chris? I can’t see you; are you polishing your glasses?

Julia attempts to draw a direct line between Russians’ private attitudes toward homosexuality and the way gays are treated in Russia, and perhaps that’s something worth exploring further. Because you can’t legislate away what people think. You can’t make people love homosexuality just by making them tolerate it, but for homosexuals there should be no difference; as long as they’re not getting smacked around, what do they care? Is it imperative that people not only leave them alone, but publicly express their loyalty and support? If so, America is still failing there as well, because nearly 50% of the American population surveyed just prior to the vote which struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (which mandated that marriage was the union of a man and woman only) were opposed to it.

I didn’t see your set of comments touching on what “Peter” replied to me about. Was there some adjustment? Note how he’s replying to my second guessing of that video. I’m of the impression that my comments on that point was posted before yours.

Whatever. One thing for sure, he doesn’t exhibit a better ability at intelligent point-counterpoint discussion than yours truly.

I’m not sure, perhaps our comments crossed in posting. Whatever the case, it was a revelation to me and is, in my opinion, no less damaging to the gay-all-day activist claptrap than that phony photo of the “massacre at Homs” the BBC posted was to the push for war in Syria. I did mention that we knew nothing of the context of the video, but that was just a fact, not because I was suspicious of it for any reason, and Peter’s answer was a revelation for me. I guess I don’t get out much.

More civil than O’Donnell while having the same slant. Like anything else, these guys can be good on some issues unlike others.

Has the video in the opening been fully confirmed as a non-skit? Propagandists the world over have been known to do such things. I linked a VoR article by Babich which gave specifics, shedding a more positive light vis-à-vis gays in Russia.

Note how Isinbayeva is hacked out of context. No mention of her saying that (in her own words) that sexual preferences should be respected as confidential.

Better to say that she believes sexual preferences shouldn’t be discriminated against. From a BBC piece I linked:

“We are against publicity but we are not of course about every choice of every single person. It’s their life, it’s their choice, it’s their feelings, but we’re just against the publicity in our country and I support that.”

You have no clue, as usual. This is no skit, it’s a MSNBC screw-up. That video has nothing to do with the current debate — it’s a year old video of Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich and his vigilante crew catching a pedophile.

I don’t know if it was mentioned here before, but Maxim Martsinkevich, a former neo-Nazi and currently a vigilante “pedophile-hunter”, has served time for hate speech and extremism in 2007-2010.

Most interesting thing is the crime for which he was sentenced to three years in prison.

On February 28, 2007, Martsinkevich and his fellow skinheads entered Moscow club “Bilingua” and disrupted political debates between journalists Yulia Latynina and Maxim Kononenko. Martsinkevich shouted “Heil Hitler” and made a short speech calling for execution of all liberals in Russia.

Organizer of the debates, Alexey Navalny filed a complaint with police. Martsinkevich was duly arrested and convicted for ““Incitement to Ethnic Strife with the Threat of the Use of Violence”.

Hate crime laws are really unhelpful and all should be repealed. Martsinkevich should be punished for the crime of torture. That previous conviction obviously did nothing to change his ways, and perhaps worsened it. Though liberals in the West like to punish hate speech, they support people like the ones at kavkazcenter. Hypocrites.

My keen intuition proves right again, as does your underhanded way of downplaying this ability, which some including yourself lack.

No one can be expert on everything. I gave myself the benefit of doubt, while sensing something to possibly not be as advertised. Superstar not Ioffe didn’t point it out on that segment, you trolling dope.

Harvey the hypocrite says he’ll take the fight wherever it’s needed. Once again, where’re the fashion/clothing/textile industries’ pressure on Bangladesh (where clothes are manufactured and sold in the West), which is far worse than what Russia can be reasonably accused of? Throw in the likes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar as well.

Quite a tough guy for saying he wanted to smack a woman considerably smaller in stature to his girth. A bit ignorant as well, given that the person he references actually so off from his views.

Some extremely interesting rumors circulating in Russian military circles recently.

Basically, the version I’ve heard is that the increasingly isolated military junta in Egypt is asking for Russian diplomatic, financial and even military support and offering in return a strategic alliance.

Continues the Saga of Catfight between Navalny and Just Russia/Fair Russia Party.
Remember that they two parties used to be allies and formed coalition in Coordinating Committee. Now they are mortal enemies. To get even with Just Russia for busting up his love nest of “Navalny Brotherhood”, Navalny launched more exposes of Oleg Pakholkov, a Duma Deputy from Just Russia.
On Wednesday, in his Twitter, Navalny accused Pakholkov of committing 15 serious crimes, including murder, robbery, and rape.

Pakholkov claims the charges are highly exagerrated, and that he is going to sue Navalny for libel.

Pakholkov is one of the Just Russia reps, along with Levichev and Noskov, who sicced police on “Navalny Brotherhood” flat on August 13. Just Russia politicians led cops to the flat, then carried off trophies of Navalny’s allegedly unauthorized campaign activities.

As an update: Of 4 of the “Navalny Brothers” detained in the flat, 2 (Kirill Andreev and Roman Pereverzev) received minor fines, equivalent to around $30 USD. The other 2 (Oleg Kozlovsky and Vasily Drovetsky) received 10 days of detention. These were administrative infractions. The infraction was not the hoarding of campaign lit, but the refusal to open the door for the police.

Meanwhile, still no word on whether landlady Zinaida was able to get her busted door replaced.

On Moscow Mayor race:Lenta is doing an interesting series of interviews and sketches of the candidates for what has been called “the third most important post in Russia”. Here is Ilya Azar’s interview with Mikhail Degtarev, from the Liberal Democrat Party.

Degtarev is 32 years old, and clearly a talented and bright young man, and even good looking [provided he keeps his clothes on – yalensis]

He is from Samara and only recently moved to Moscow, which he does not see as a deficit for the job of Mayor; on the contrary, Degtarev points out that up to 30% of “Muscovites” nowadays are new arrivals from the provinces, so he can relate to them, and they can relate to him.

Degtarev’s defining characteristic is his hero worship of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whom he regards as the greatest man alive today (maybe ever). Degtarev plays Alcibiades to Zhirinovsky’s Socrates [both in and out of the bathhouse – yalensis]

By profession, aside from politics, Degtarev is a mechanical engineer. He patented an invention and will soon defend his dissertation on, a new process to [I hope I get this right – I had to look up some words – yalensis] extrude metallic wire from some kind of mechanical spindle called a “zigovka”. Seemingly in contradiction with his scientific training, Degtarev happens to be a religious mystic, but he does not see a contradiction between the two sets of beliefs. Degtarev believes that Moscow is literally the Third Rome, and is assigned a role in the coming apocalypse and defeat of the anti-Christ.

In the meantime, he defends Russia from “Fifth Columnists” like Alexei Navalny and corruptionists like Sergei Sob’anin. He is confident that he can pull at least 20% of the vote to get himself into Round #2. Based partly on his good looks and his success with female voters. [provided he keeps his clothes on – yalensis]

As Photo #2 shows, when he is in the bathhouse with Zhirinovsky, Degtarev wears a felt cap to protect his ears, and a cross around his neck. [aaaa i just noticed Zhirinovsky’s hairy left mammary gland – i had to run off and throw up, now I’m back at my computer – yalensis]

Interviewer asks Deg a final, piquant question about having a gay pride parade in Moscow. Deg goes off on a rant about how sexual minorities are getting too uppity, they should just shut their pieholes, be humble, and stay indoors where nobody can see them. If he was mayor, he MIGHT allow a gay parade, but only in the dark of night, when all the vulnerable children were in bed.

Lots of other interesting comments too, great interview.
Interview doesn’t say if Deg is married or not. Ladies, this handsome devil MIGHT be available!

A few over here have said that English RIAN’s anti-Putin rhetoric is moderating, but I seriously don’t see it. This article for example could’ve been posted at MSNBC, CNN or even Fox News or any other outlet:

All the same “buzz words” that these US outlets use are employed here. Also, there’s never mention of the Duma passing the law unanimously in these articles, thus promoting the idea that the bill was “Kremlin Sponsored.”